U.S. oil companies have been frozen out of the first major round of bidding for exploratory oil-field development contracts in (non-Kurdish) Iraq: Not a single U.S. company secured a deal in the auction of contracts that will shape the Iraqi oil industry for the next couple of decades. Two of the most lucrative of the [...]

I wish they gave out Pulitzers for blog posts, because Nathan Hodge deserves one for this. It’s a raised eyebrow at the increasing willingness of think tanks to underwrite national security journalists. Nathan’s judicious conclusion: In my earlier posts on the defense-intellectual complex, some bloggers seized on the topic to suggest that think tanks were [...]

Things I didn’t know but learn when I get a new Twitter follower: Shane Harris, an excellent security journalist at National Journal, has a website where you can access his work in one handy place. Some of his longer-form pieces are up here, as is promo material (which I gather is the rationale for the [...]

Bear with me a minute. So to recapitulate my Iron Man argument really quickly: Shellhead is a critique of American imperialism. Starts off in a Cold War context. That gives rise to the inevitable Soviet attempts to build their own Iron Man — the somewhat inept Crimson Dynamo. The critique eventually gets rolling and subversive [...]

I don’t write about health care. I don’t know what I think about the health care bill or the efforts to kill it, and it doesn’t matter what I think, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have close friends on all sides of the issue. But I care very deeply about liberalism [...]

Gloria Estefan did a puffy interview (“I have a very important question to start off this interview, which chimney will Santa be coming down?”) with Obama for Univision. Ben Smith snarks: “She didn’t manage to ask about the new immigration reform legislation, and indeed, with questions like these, who needs answers.” OK, sure, chuckle, celebrity [...]

This day is slipping away from me and I have a ton still to do. But I call your attention for now to this post of mine at the Windy about the Senate’s contractor watchdog, Claire McCaskill, and what she’s found in Afghanistan: a doubling of Defense Department-hired private security contractors in the last six [...]

My pal Aaron Leitko has a wonderful story in City Paper this week about the end of an era for punk rock in the DC area: the developer-assisted implosion of Arlington’s punkhouses. I say “assisted” because punkhouses collapse for all the typical reasons — people move out; rent fights; noise ordinances pose a problem; the [...]

As I wrote over at the Windy, this is the most important component of the Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster story about how a $25.95 off-the-shelf hack is allowing insurgents to see video from U.S. drones: The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has [...]

I will want to update this essay in 2010. Iron Man: Multipolarity ensues. I also love what they’re doing with War Machine in the comics this past year — the Blackwater parable has been intense. Update: After talking to Weigel, I’m a little concerned about this. Remember how in Spider-Man 3 you had Venom kind [...]